BOOKS OF THE TIMES

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; A Martha Stewart on the Inexorable Path to Her Lost Self

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: May 18, 2001

BACK WHEN WE WERE GROWN-UPS

By Anne Tyler

274 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.

Anne Tyler's lumpy new novel, ''Back When We Were Grown-Ups,'' has all the ingredients her readers have come to expect: an eccentric Baltimore family, a quirky protagonist suffering from a midlife crisis, a jerry-built plot that pivots around one character's sudden death and a supporting cast of oddballs fond of using quaint little expressions like ''Oh, piffle'' and ''Just dandy.''

This fiction has always hovered perilously close to the line between heartfelt emotion and cloying sentimentality: while novels like ''Saint Maybe'' and ''Breathing Lessons'' easily rose above the contrivance of their plots through the author's intimate knowledge of her characters' inner lives, others, like ''A Patchwork Planet,'' sunk distressingly into mawkishness. In the case of ''Grown Ups,'' the novel weaves back and forth across that crucial line, veering dangerously into cuteness time and time again only to be rescued in the book's latter half by Ms. Tyler's sure sense of family dynamics and domestic ritual.

The heroine of ''Grown-Ups'' is one Rebecca Davitch, a grandmother and small-time Martha Stewart who presides with ''unrelenting jollity'' over a party and catering service called the Open Arms. The service advertises itself as arranging celebrations for ''All of Life's Occasions From the Cradle to the Grave,'' and over the years, Rebecca -- or ''Beck,'' as her extended family calls her -- has become the consummate party giver, expert at concocting cute rhyming toasts for her guests and adept at orchestrating the ebb and flow of conversation.

She is the one in the Davitch clan to take charge during a crisis -- and there are many crises, both small and large, in their chaotic household -- and she is the one to boost the spirits of family members when they are down. One of her relatives tells her she ought to become a game show contestant: she's got just that kind of enthusiasm and pep.

Things were not always thus. Three decades ago, when Rebecca impulsively married Joe Davitch, she was a polite, retiring woman, overwhelmed by her older husband's boisterous family. Joe, who first glimpsed Rebecca at a party, believed mistakenly that she was a ''natural-born celebrator'' and during their marriage Rebecca did her best to live up to his expectations. In the years since Joe's death in a car accident, Rebecca has assumed the role of family matriarch, ministering to her three stepdaughters and the daughter she had with Joe as well as her doting brother-in-law, her 99-year-old great-uncle and assorted grandchildren and hangers-on.

At the age of 53, however, Rebecca is suddenly overwhelmed by the sense that she is somehow living someone else's life. Like Macon Leary in ''The Accidental Tourist'' and Ian Bedlow in ''Saint Maybe,'' she finds herself in a midlife funk, torn between the imperatives of freedom and familial responsibility, independence and domesticity. ''How on earth did I get like this?'' she asks herself. ''How? How did I ever become this person who's not really me?'' She wonders what her life might have been like had she not dropped out of college and impulsively married Joe so many years ago; she wonders where the road not taken might have led.

And so Rebecca sets off on a search for her lost self. She revisits her hometown, where her mother and aunt still live. She begins a reading regimen as a form of self-improvement. And she looks up her high school and college sweetheart, Will Allenby, the man she summarily dumped for Joe some 30 years ago.

Though Rebecca improbably manages to take up with Will pretty much where they left off, Ms. Tyler makes it clear to the reader that Will isn't a terribly appealing suitor: he's pretentious and peevish and uptight. Once a week he makes a batch of chili for himself and divides it into seven containers for each night of the week; he answers the phone saying, ''Dr. Allenby speaking,'' and he's got ''large, square wolfish teeth, unattractively yellowed'' with age.

Given Will's flaws, it's not hard to see where his romance with Rebecca is headed. For that matter, none of the characters in ''Grown-Ups'' is particularly sympathetic: Joe comes across as a big, pushy fellow with a dark streak of self-absorption, and their daughter, Min Foo, as a petulant narcissist who discards her husbands as blithely as used hankies.

Even Rebecca often seems callous and self-serving. Though she knew Will most of her life and dated him for years, she dumps him for Joe without so much as a note or conversation. She almost never says what's on her mind, masking her perpetual impatience with cheery platitudes, and she's spent the better part of her life trying to live up to her late husband's image of her as a bouncy enthusiast, despite her own reserved nature.

In most of her earlier novels, Ms. Tyler would have used her generous gifts of compassion to limn the interior lives of Rebecca and her family, to make their often curious behavior feel plausible, even sympathetic. In ''Grown-Ups,'' however, she tends to stand back from her characters, allowing them to slip toward caricature. What saves them from becoming cartoon figures, what in fact saves this novel from bathos, is Ms. Tyler's ability to situate these incomplete people in a matrix of familial relationships that lend them emotional ballast and define their daily lives.

In showing how family traits are passed down generation to generation, in showing how shared rituals, celebrations and crises create a communal history, she demonstrates the talents that galvanized so many of her earlier books and that help redeem this very flawed novel.